"American Indian Pidgin English"

[Sally Thomason]

David and all,

   I haven't seen thta particular article (or book?) of
Drechsel's, but if he says that, he's mistaken.  AIPE has
been the subject of a number of scholarly papers, some of
them very good.  It's true that the number of grammatical
features that cam be definitely established for AIPE
(American Indian Pidgin English) is relatively small -- the
documentation of the pidgin isn't super -- but there's enough
data to show what some of the grammar was like.  The
transitive suffix -em that we were talking about earlier is
perhaps the most interesting feature, since it's both systematic
in the AIPE documents and very different from English grammar.

  -- Sally